Tag Archives: writer: cs lewis

Voyage to Venus / Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis

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Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one, sorry):

According to his own account he was not what we call conscious, and yet at the same time the experience was a very positive one with a quality of its own. On one occasion, someone had been talking about “seeing life” in the popular sense of knocking about the world and getting to know people, and B. who was present (and who is an Anthroposophist) said something I can’t quite remember about “seeing life” in a very different sense. I think he was referring to some system of meditation which claimed to make “the form of Life itself” visible to the inner eye. At any rate Ransom let himself in for a long cross-examination by failing to conceal the fact that he attached some very definite idea to this. He even went so far–under extreme pressure–as to say that life appeared to him, in that condition, as a “coloured shape.” Asked “what colour,” he gave a curious look and could only say “what colours! yes, what colours!” But then he spoiled it all by adding, “of course it wasn’t colour at all really. I mean, not what we’d call colour,” and shutting up completely for the rest of the evening. Another hint came out when a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as “So you think you’re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there’ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye’ll have a grand time of it!” when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, “Oh, don’t you see, you ass, that there’s a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?” That, of course, directed McPhee’s fire to him. What emerged was that in Ransom’s opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said “engulfed.” He used the word “trans-sexual” I remember and began to hunt about for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting “trans-gastronomic”), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels. But I am pretty sure he was thinking of something he had experienced on his voyage to Venus. But perhaps the most mysterious thing he ever said about it was this. I was questioning him on the subject–which he doesn’t often allow–and had incautiously said, “Of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,” when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.” And that is about all I can tell you of his journey. One thing is certain, that he came back from Venus even more changed than he had come back from Mars. But of course that may have been because of what happened to him after his landing.

This is the second of C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, after Out of the Silent Planet which is set on Mars, and before the eminently skippable That Hideous Strength, set on Earth. It is a re-telling of the Garden of Eden myth, with Weston, the villain of the previous book, turning up as the corrupting Satan for the Venusian Adam and Eve (particularly the latter) and Ransom (the hero) doing his best do counter Weston by means of argument and eventually brute force. It’s a story of not always totally exciting philosophical discussions against a fantastic and well-described landscape, with a sense of the mythic importance of the struggle between Good and Evil. Lewis says in a note at the start that “All the human characters in this book are purely fictitious and none of them is allegorical.” I am not sure that I agree!

The whole thing is told in a framing narrative by Lewis as himself, including this reflection on just how evil Professor Weston is:

He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of “scientifiction,” in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite–the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species–a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary. In Professor Weston the power had at last met the dream. 

Obviously a direct attack on science fiction, science fiction fandom, and interplanetary colonisation, an early shot in the dialogue that he later had with Arthur C. Clarke. Given that this was published in 1943, one can forgive a certain scepticism about the unbridled benefits of technology. However, C.S. Lewis was not about to challenge Hugh Carswell for the title of first Belfast science fiction fan.

Anyway, you can get Voyage to Venus (under the original title Perelandra) here.

This was my top book in my LibraryThing catalogue which I had not already written up. That pile has now been somewhat up-ended by receiving two dozen books from my father’s library, so the next will be East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: Stories, Letters, and Commentary By and About C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke, ed. Ryder W. Miller

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

But Clarke was also a famous visionary linked with developments in space exploration, and he explored the role and potentials of technology. He has been one of our guides to the grand adventure of space exploration, one who could write a story and one with wit, but also one who could bring clarity to the explication of complicated scientific issues.

I skimmed this book when writing up Childhood’s End and then came back to it a couple of days later. It has three parts: 1) an analytical introduction, including short profiles of Lewis and Clarke and a preface by Clarke himself; 2) the actual correspondence between Lewis and Clarke, which consists of fifteen letters over the years between 1936 and 1954, some of them very short; and 3) stories and essays by the two writers, three by Lewis and eight by Clarke. The publication history is rather droll, but Miller isn’t a terribly deep analyst and he makes a number of obvious mistakes in reading Lewis’s handwriting; also the first of the stories included, “Ministering Angels” by Lewis, is just repulsive (a sex worker and a feminist go to Mars). The primary non-fiction material is welcome, but the rest a bit superfluous.

The Americans who married C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke; and Childhood’s End

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In C.S. Lewis’s earliest surviving letter to Joy Davidman Gresham, dated 22 December 1953, he wrote:

Dear Joy–

As far as I can remember you were non-committal about Childhood’s End: I suppose you were afraid that you might raise my expectations too high and lead to disappointment. If that was your aim, it has succeeded, for I came to it expecting nothing in particular and have been thoroughly bowled over. It is quite out of range of the common space-and-time writers…

[three paragraphs of substantial analysis follow]

And now, what do you think? Do you agree that it is AN ABSOLUTE CORKER?

…It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any ‘realistic’ drivel about some neurotic in a London flat–something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books–as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.

One of many interesting things about this is that Joy actually knew Arthur C. Clarke, and other London science fiction writers such as Sam “John Christopher” Youd, long before she knew C.S. Lewis; her previous husband, William Lindsay Gresham, knew Martin Gardner, Frederik Pohl and Robert A. Heinlein, and Joy herself was a regular attender of the science fiction meetups at the White Horse Tavern which is how she knew Clarke.

She showed Lewis’s letter to Clarke, and (needless to say) he was thrilled, and fired off an enthusiastic reply. An exchange of views between Lewis and Clarke began, though there was no real meeting of minds. Clarke himself wrote in a preface to the published correspondence:

As far as I can recall, Lewis and I met only once. The encounter took place at Oxford in the well-known pub, the Eastgate. I was accompanied by my fellow Interplanetarian, Val Cleaver, and Lewis brought along a friend whose name I didn’t catch. Needless to say, neither side converted the other, and we refused to abandon our diabolical schemes of interplanetary conquest. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’s parting words were: “I’m sure you’re very wicked people—but how dull it would be if everyone was good.”

C.S. Lewis’s friend? It was another Oxford don, one J.R.R. Tolkien, who I met again some years later at a lunch in London. My only recollection of that occasion is Tolkien pointing to his diminutive publisher and whispering to me: “Now you see where I got the idea of the Hobbits?”

Perhaps one reason why our correspondence was virtually non-existent in later years was that I was in indirect touch with Lewis all the time through Joy Gresham. Every week we London science fiction writers, editors and publishers met in the White Horse tavern—the scarcely disguised background of my Tales of the White Hart. It was Joy who sent Lewis Childhood’s End—I don’t know whether she did it on her own volition, but can well believe I did a certain amount of arm-twisting.

I was very fond of Joy, one of the most charming and intelligent people I’ve ever known. Her ultimate marriage to C.S. Lewis was a great surprise to everyone. Its tragic outcome has been dramatized in the play, Shadowlands, and was described by Lewis himself in A Grief Observed, which I have never had the heart to read.

(I’ve now also read the correspondence between them, and will write that up in a couple of days.)

As well as seeing the TV play Shadowlands when it was first broadcast in 1985, I actually saw it on stage in London in 1990, with Nigel Hawthorne as C.S. Lewis, Jane Lapotaire as Joy and Geoffrey Toone as Lewis’ brother Warren. I can still count the number of West End shows I have been to on the fingers of both hands, and this was definitely in the top three.

Childhood’s End was Clarke’s fifth novel, after Against the Fall of Night, Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars and Islands in the Sky. It’s in a completely different league to the others, and indeed to most science fiction of the day; and it’s impossible that Joy could not have recognised this. So it’s entirely plausible that Lewis’s guess was right, and she did deliberately underplay her enthusiasm for Childhood’s End to him, partly out of concern that he might not like it and partly in hope that he would be pleasantly surprised when he did.

It is an interesting coincidence that within a couple of years of each other, both Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis married much younger American women. While thinking about what I was going to write here, I looked a bit more into Clarke’s own brief marriage to Marilyn Torgeson née Mayfield, which almost precisely coincided with the finalisation and publication of Childhood’s End in 1953 – the first edition is dedicated “To Marilyn, who let me read the proofs on our honeymoon.” (You will probably not find this in your edition of the book.)

The received wisdom is that when they met in March 1953, Marilyn was 22, divorced and had a son by her previous marriage. However, the data I have gleaned on Ancestry.com suggests a more complex backstory, as follows:

  • 28 April 1931: born as Marilyn Martin Mayfield to David Alexander Mayfield jr (1901-1997) and Nellie Lee Martin (1907-1932) in Jacksonville, Florida. She had one older brother, David Alexander Mayfield III (1928-2008).
  • 1932 (precise date unknown): death of Marilyn’s mother.
  • 1933: father remarries to Erma E. Myers, née Eleazer (1908-1964), from South Carolina.
  • 12 August 1948: Marilyn, age 17, marries 19-year-old Robert Ives Brooks (1919-2011) in Jacksonville, which is where both were born.
  • 24 May 1949: Marilyn, now 18, marries 21-year-old Edwin Torgeson (1927-2003) in Los Angeles. He was born in New York. Presumably her first marriage had been formally dissolved; available records are incomplete.
  • 1950: Edwin and Marilyn Torgeson are recorded as living together in Jacksonville in a city directory.
  • 24 April 1950: the federal census records Edwin as living in Alachua, Florida, 120 km / 70 miles from Jacksonville. His marital status is given as “Separated”.
  • 25 March 1951: Marilyn gives birth to Philip Alexander Torgeson (1951-2005), who lives all his life in Jacksonville (and did not marry, as far as I can tell).
  • 21 February 1953: Edwin Torgeson remarries in Los Angeles to Mary Jane Highfield (1930-2008). They have one son.
  • 28 May 1953: Marilyn meets 35-year-old Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) a month after her 22nd birthday. She is working at the Ocean Reef Harbor Club in Key Largo, Florida.
  • 15 June 1953: Marilyn and Arthur marry in New York, and she moves to London with him, leaving her son in the care of the Torgesons.
  • August 1953: Childhood’s End is published, and rapidly becomes a huge success. As previously noted, it is dedicated “To Marilyn, who let me read the proofs on our honeymoon.”
  • Late 1953: the Clarkes’ marriage does not work out.
  • December 1953: Marilyn returns to Florida.
  • January 1954: Arthur visits Marilyn in Florida to agree the terms of their separation.
  • February 1955: publication of Arthur’s next novel, Earthlight. This time the dedication is “To Val/who massacred the second draft/And Bernie who slaughtered the third—/but particularly to Marilyn who spent the advance before I got to Chapter 2.”
  • 1956: Arthur moves permanently to Sri Lanka, where he later develops a relationship with Leslie Ekanayake (1947-77).
  • December 1964: Marilyn and Arthur’s divorce is formalised. Neither married again.
  • 24 June 1991: Marilyn dies aged 60 in Jacksonville, still using the surname “Clarke” after almost forty years.
  • 19 March 2008: Arthur C. Clarke dies aged 90 in Sri Lanka.

Clarke’s authorised biographies say that Marilyn had one previous marriage and a child at the time that they met, but in fact, as far as I can tell, she had been married twice. I note that her son was born eleven months after Edwin was recorded in the census as ‘separated’, though it’s also clear that Edwin exercised paternal rights and treated Philip as his child. It’s not really anyone else’s business, of course.

So, coming back to Childhood’s End for myself, I had read it a couple of times previously but needed to be reminded of it. (I’m a bit ashamed to realise that the last time I name-checked Clarke’s best books in a blog post here, I forgot about it.) It was a happy return.

To get one thing out of the way, here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

This was another of those restless nights when his brain went on turning like a machine whose governor had failed. He knew better than to woo sleep any further, and reluctantly climbed out of bed. Throwing on his dressing gown, he strolled out on to the roof garden of his modest flat. There was not one of his direct subordinates who did not possess much more luxurious quarters, but this place was ample for Stormgren’s needs. He had reached the position where neither personal possessions nor official ceremony could add anything to his stature.

Many of Clarke’s books explore, with some fascination, the world of metaphysics and the spirit, and I think Childhood’s End sets the tone for that exploration. It’s a book that is ahead of its time, sowing the seeds for the hippy era a decade in the future, with the whole of humanity being prepared by for a massive shift of consciousness, into transcendence – but overseen by the alien Overlords who force the people of Earth to give up childish things like war and religion. It feeds directly into the climax of 2001. Yes, it’s a clunky 1950s story in form and style, but not in content.

It’s also got the closest examination of human relationships that I can think of in any of Clarke’s works. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the women (or indeed the men) are particularly memorable, but the book shows a sympathy for emotional and family life that is unusual both for sf of that time and for Clarke’s work as a whole. We know that he did not meet Marilyn until the book was almost finished, but I surmise that he was emotionally ready for a committed relationship, and she happened to be in the right place at the right time. (Though unfortunately they turned out to be the wrong people for each other.)

You can get it here.

So, this was the top book on my shelves which I had not already reviewed online. Appropriately enough, the next is Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis.

Jane McNeill – the missing link between C.S. Lewis and Helen Waddell

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I’ve just finished reading the first Helen Waddell biography, Mark of the Maker by Monica Blackett, and I was again struck by the fact that she doesn’t seem to have had much to do with C.S. Lewis, who like her was from Northern Ireland (indeed, also from County Down, though from a different corner of the county), and like her made his name in England, as an expert on literature and religion.

There were of course differences between them: Helen Waddell was a decade older, her emphasis was more on literature while Lewis’s was more on religion, she never got a tenured academic job while he was at Oxford from his teens, she split her time between London and County Down as an adult while he rarely if ever went back to Belfast. In his memoirs, David Bleakley, who I remember well as a fading political figure in the 1990s, gives an insight of conversations with Lewis at Oxford in the late 1940s:

I was disappointed that he could not be drawn on Helen Waddell, whose “star” was high and with whom he had much in common. Helen was a great favorite back home, where she was held in high esteem at Queen’s University.

Helen Waddell never mentions C.S. Lewis as far as I can tell, and Lewis’ most substantial reference to her is in a letter dated 16 February 1921 (when he would have been 22 and she 31), and then nothing else afterwards, even though their paths must have run close together. In 1921 he wrote to his father of an Oxford dinner party:

I met a friend of the said Tchainie’s the other night at the Carlyles, a girl called Helen Waddell whom you may have heard of. When last I saw her she was lying face downward on the floor of Mrs McNeill’s drawing-room, saying rather good things in a quaint Belfast drawl.

‘Tchainie’ Is Jane Agnes McNeill (1890-1959), a schoolmate of Helen Waddell’s at what is now Victoria College. Jane’s father, who died in 1907, was the first headmaster of Campbell College, the Belfast school which Lewis later attended. Jane and her mother took Helen Waddell on a trip to France in 1924, during which Helen Waddell wrote this poem:

JANE or The Perfect Traveller

She likes to travel in the train.
She never smells an open drain.
On boats she talks to stewardesses,
And gives advice in their distresses.
She is not sick in any swell,
But only in each new hotel.
And even in Paris summer heat
She wears goloshes on her feet.

Jane McNeill was also close to C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren, and one gets the impression that they had spent a lot of youthful hours at her mother’s house in Belfast. Both of them dedicated books to her – in Warren’s case, his second book, published in 1955, The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine (his first book, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV, was dedicated “To My Brother”).

Ten years earlier, in 1945, C.S. Lewis dedicated That Hideous Strength to “J. McNeill”. Following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, it is the third of his Space Trilogy, whose central character, Elwin Ransom, is based on J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewisian lore has it that Jane did not like That Hideous Strength, and did not really appreciate the dedication.

When Jane McNeill died in 1959, four years before C.S. Lewis and six years before Helen Waddell, Lewis wrote in The Campbellian, the magazine of his old school where her father had been headmaster:

Molliter Ossa Cubent
[‘May Her Bones Lie Softly’, a quotation from Ovid meaning ‘Rest in Peace’]

Of Miss McNeill the charitable lady, the teacher, the member of committees, I saw nothing. My knowledge is of Janie McNeill; even of Chanie, as we sometimes called her, for she had the habit, common in some Scottish dialects, of ‘unvoicing’ the consonant ‘J’. Obviously there is a great deal I never knew. Someone writes to me describing her as a mystic. I would never have guessed it. What I remember is something as boisterous, often as discomposing but always as fresh and tonic, as a high wind. Janie was the delight and terror of a little Strandtown and Belmont circle, now almost extinct. I remember wild walks on the (still unspoilt) Holywood hills, preposterous jokes shouted through the gale across half a field, extravagantly merry (yet also Lucullan) lunches and suppers at Lisnadene, devastating raillery, the salty tang of an immensely vivid personality. She was a religious woman, a true, sometimes a grim, daughter of the Kirk; no less certainly, the broadest-spoken maiden lady in the Six Counties. She was a born satirist. Every kind of sham and self-righteousness was her butt. She deflated the unco-gude with a single ironic phrase, then a moment’s silence, then the great gust of her laughter. She laughed with her whole body. When I consider how all this was maintained through years of increasing loneliness, pain, disability, and inevitable frustration I am inclined to say she had a soul as brave and uncomplaining as any I ever knew. Few have come nearer to obeying Dunbar’s magnificent recipe (she knew her Dunbar):

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry.

The two descriptions, thirty-five years apart, give an intriguing picture of a woman who was a close friend to two people who were not friendly with each other. I see that the New York C.S. Lewis Society published an essay on “Jane McNeill and C.S. Lewis” by Mary Rogers in 1979, but cannot access it from their website. Maybe I’ll do some further research some day.

Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays: on Tolkien, the Inklings and Fantasy Literature, by David Bratman

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Second paragraph of third essay (Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from “The Lord of the Rings”: A Textual Excursion into the “History of the “The Lord of the Rings””):

We know about these rejects and false starts because Tolkien was a pack rat. He neither burned his rejects nor threw them in the trash; he saved them. Just about all of the drafts and manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings are preserved at the Archives of Marquette University, and a detailed narrative account of the slow crafting and polishing of the tale was stitched together by Christopher Tolkien in the four volumes of “The History of The Lord of the Rings,” a subseries of the 12–volume History of Middle-earth. The volumes are The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated; the Appendices are treated separately in The Peoples of Middle-earth, and will not be discussed in this paper.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever met David Bratman in the flesh, but he was one of those who kept the faith with Livejournal until quite late in the day, and indeed posted a lengthy and well-argued rebuttal to my foolish assertion that Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring is Any Good At All.

I was tipped off to this book of essays by File 770, and grabbed it immediately. I’m a sucker for any serious Tolkieniana, and what I particularly liked about the essays collected here is their chronological scope, from a time before The Silmarillion had been publish to nearly the present day. The shape of the scholarly field has changed a lot in the meantime a there are several telling anecdotes about the early days. If I had to pick two of the Tolkien pieces that really struck me, I think they would be the Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from The Lord of the Rings, and the exegesis of Smith of Wootton Major.

The other essays include four pieces about the Inklings (two on C.S. Lewis, one on Charles Williams and one on their links with the Pacific), and several on other fantasy topics, including a fascinating piece on Lord Dunsany as a playwright, and a standup encomium of Roger Zelazny. There is also a critique of the Peter Jackson films written presciently before they had actually been released.

There’s a lot of wisdom in these essays, and a fair amount of fun too. You can get the book here.